The rape conviction of a California man who pretended to be a sleeping woman's boyfriend has been overturned, with an appeals court ruling Wednesday that an arcane law from 1872 doesn't protect unmarried women in such cases.

By reversing the decision, the Los Angeles court ruled that Julio Morales, a friend of the victim's brother, should not be convicted of raping a woman and serving the three year sentence that he originally faced.

He was accused of entering a woman's bedroom late one night after her boyfriend had gone home and initiating sexual intercourse while she was asleep, after a night of drinking.

Rape: The man admitted that he got into bed with the sleeping woman after he boyfriend had left for the night, and he even said that when he began having sex with her she may have been confused

The victim said her boyfriend was in the room when she fell asleep, and they'd decided against having sex that night because he didn't have a condom and he had to be somewhere early the next day.

Morales admits in court documents that at one point during the 2009 incident he thought that the victim may have believed she was kissing her boyfriend Victor in the darkened room, and it wasn't until a ray of light from outside the room flashed across his face that she realized he wasn't her boyfriend, according to prosecutors.

The woman has not been identified, in keeping with reporting standards in cases of sexual assault.

The reversal of the rape charge is based on a seemingly-archaic law in the California penal code that states: 'any person who fraudulently obtains the consent of another to sexual relations escapes criminal liability (at least as a sex offender under tit. IX of the Pen. Code), unless he (or she) ... masquerades as the victim‟s spouse'.

RELATED ARTICLES

Share this article

Share

Under that definition, Morales cannot be charged because the man he was 'pretending to be' was the alleged victim's boyfriend and not her spouse.

'Has the man committed rape? Because of historical anomalies in the law and the statutory definition of rape, the answer is no, even though, if the woman had been married and the man had impersonated her husband, the answer would be yes,' Judge Thomas L. Willhite Jr. wrote in the court's decision.

On the night of the incident, the
victim who is identified only as Jane Doe, her boyfriend Victor, her
brother Filiberto, and some of Filiberto's friends went to a house party
where she had three to five beers.

The
group returned to the house shared by Jane and Filiberto to have a late
night snack in the living room. Jane Doe and Victor later went up to her
bedroom and fell asleep.

Outrage: Many cannot believe that the Los Angeles Court of Appeals overturned the ruling based on the 1872 law that does not give unmarried women the same protections as married ones

Victor left some time after his girlfriend fell asleep, and at one point when her brother Filiberto had stepped outside, Morales went upstairs and got into bed with Jane Doe.

LA Weekly cites court documents where the victim explains that she was awoken to the 'sensation of having sex' and began to realize that something was awry.

'She was in a different position on the bed, perpendicular to the position she had been in when she fell asleep. She was confused because she and Victor had agreed not to have sex that night,' the court documents read.

Ruling: Judge Thomas L. Willhite Jr. called the action 'despicable' but said that the law could not force a conviction

'When light coming through a crack in the bedroom door illuminated the face of the person having sex with her, i.e., defendant, she realized it was not Victor and tried to push him away. Defendant grabbed her thighs and pushed his penis back into her vagina. She pushed him away again and began to cry and yell.'

After forcing Morales out of her room, she called Victor. He then rushed over to the house and called police. During the interrogation that night, Morales admitted that he knew that she was not fully aware of what was happening when he had sex with her.

'He admitted that he had gone into Jane‟s room while she was asleep. He said that he had kissed her and that she kissed him back, but he thought she might still be asleep. He pulled down her pajama bottoms, got on top of her, and started to have sex,' he said to a police deputy.

'He said she probably thought he was her boyfriend, and when she realized he was not, she started screaming.'

Without taking any reformation action themselves, the decision handed down by the court of appeals also urges the Legislature to examine the law.

In 2010, a similar law in Idaho prevented an unmarried woman from pressing rape charges after being tricked into sex with a stranger by her then-boyfriend.

The judge called what happened "despicable" but said the state's law left the court with no choice.

Idaho's law was amended to cover all women in 2011, but there has been no formal motion to do the same in California yet.